


Anything For You

by MadiYasha



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon The Movie: Everyone's Story
Genre: M/M, Songfic, mama always used to say if you wanted something done you had to do it urself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 07:24:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17239967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadiYasha/pseuds/MadiYasha
Summary: Toren wonders why his scientist’s soul extends only to pokémon—why he can’t distill a person’s essence, take it like a medicine that would cure every imperfection he hates about himself.





	Anything For You

**Author's Note:**

> please watch pokemon the movie the power of us 2018

_I have walked a million miles in a hundred pairs of shoes_  
_In search of some universal **truth**  _  
_Well a **deity** just came to me, and handed me a scroll to read _  
_And I will gladly pass it on to **you**. _

 

 

Toren notices his looks long after his beguiling elocution—the squareness of his jaw, the brightness in his eyes. When you live a life hiding behind everything that offers you semblance of shelter, it’s easy to fall in love with the strangers who don’t, who can’t blend in. Every passerby on the street, every commuter riding the tram from one corner of Fula to another. Without words in your throat, you’re born aching for theirs to fill the agonizing silence. Toren watches people, wills their bolder traits to become his own.

Callahan has a voice that dominates everything around it, unbecoming were it not for the confident lilt that it rides on. He seems to never stop moving—he does not tell stories, he becomes them. Toren wonders why his scientist’s soul extends only to pokémon—why he can’t distill a person’s essence, take it like a medicine that would cure every imperfection he hates about himself. Chansey’s at his back with a hand that whispers  _you’re lost in your head, again,_  and he knows far better than to doubt her judgment _._  He sighs. He gets up. He leaves, hoping that maybe the next stranger he falls for will be the one he’s lucky and brave enough to survey.

It’s barely noon when Callahan pries the doors of Toren’s lab open, a glint in his eye that roars  _I dare you to find someone better._

  
  


 

“Professor. Come on. This is the only way.”

His feet are tangled in fallen vines, and Toren tries not to drown in the sound of his own heartbeat as it hammers around his head, angry trumbeak chattering at his skull. Scenarios are constantly on loop in the scientist’s racing mind, horror movies that lack an off switch. His throat dries, his palms sweat— _what’s wrong with you?!_  His inner monologue screams. If anyone should be ready for everything to go wrong, it should be the man who spends his days clawing for air in these stifling worst cases. Now his mistakes have wrought chaos, his worst nightmares have been realized, the universe he spends his day to day battling is  _reality_. Still, he can’t move. He runs bitten down nails through unkempt viridian tresses, dug into his aching head.

“Callahan,” his voice quivers, and he feels like he’s not worthy enough to share space with a soul so vibrant, so strong, so utterly aflame even in chaos.

“My colleagues put all their efforts into making this, and—”  _too many words. Too many words. Calm down. You only need a few._  “It’s all that exists!”

Toren wants to run, his mouth won’t stop moving. Every fear, every worry, if he just speaks it to the winds so famous around this dying city, maybe the static in his chest will stop. He doesn’t want to meet Callahan’s eyes, scared of the judgment and resentment he’ll find there. It’s in the downcast gazes of everyone who knows him as anything more than a stranger, anyone who’s been unlucky enough to learn his wretched heart. Toren knows what he’ll see—this man he’s so admired since the day he first saw him, eyes tainted with annoyance, begging him without words to just  _shut up_.

Terrified, Toren blinks his gaze back open, staring his fears dead on. Callahan’s eyes are resolute, burning with protection.

“Okay. I get it,” he says, and on anyone else, it would translate in the scientist’s head to  _be quiet. I’m sick of you._  Callahan’s fingers are brushing Toren’s shaking own, though, their softness betraying the rigidity that frames him up against the moonlight like a statue. The taller man’s heart lurches forward, flutters in a way he can’t attribute to the anxiety that digs its claws into him day and night. His whole frame loosens. Callahan delicately traces his thumb over Toren’s trembling pinky, holding both him and the antidote as though they’re paper angels.

“I’ll make sure it gets there,” he promises, voice relentlessly determined. “For the sake of my little Kellie.”

He’s utterly still, save for the ginger motions of his hand on Toren’s, and the lack of movement tells the scientist he’s speaking only the truth. It’s only when he feels the colour creeping up on his cheeks that Toren realizes he’s hoping for an additional sentiment.

 _This is no time for those thoughts!_  He fights himself.

Still, Callahan won’t stop looking only at him.

  


 

Lying to Toren is intoxicating.

It’d be a lie in itself to say that Callahan doesn’t  _know_  why he wound up the way he did. He knows exactly why—every plain look and averted gaze, every trophy Mia won just for showing up, every second he caught his reflection in store windows and realized there was no good or evil within him, there was simply  _nothing_. He knows why, but it’s not a story that’s lighthearted or interesting. Certainly, not one that draws a crowd—and even if it did, who wants pity?

The truth never makes for good stories. It’s a thought he’s internalized time and time again, one he still finds himself falling back on, even long after the crisis has ended. He has to snap himself out of it manually, nowadays—force himself to remember the sheen of Lugia’s feathers, the thunderclaps that tore off the golden beast on the mountaintop. Most days, it’s not until someone else references it that Callahan remembers it’s something that really happened. He’s lived a life where reality and fiction blur together in his mind—they have to, after all. It’d be a problem if he lost his nerve.

It’s the dark of night in his memories, there’s a spitfire of an engineer on one side of him and a brilliant sunbeam of a researcher on the other, and Callahan feels the sort of incredibly small and insignificant in this story that makes words he can’t filter crop up in his throat. Most days, he doesn’t think before they come out.

“Professor! Look at this!” he tears forward, a hand affectionately resting on Toren’s shoulder. “ _I_  got this lump moving!”

There’s an almost immediate falter as soon as he registers he’s said it, because Harriet’s standing right there and if anyone’s going to immediately expose him, it’s her. She doesn’t have time before Toren softens, a bright smile on his face that’s hiding something Callahan realizes he’s utterly  _longing_  to pry apart. When the scientist speaks, his voice is laced with respect, with grace, with a serenity it nearly always seems to lack.

“That can’t be the truth!”

Toren’s smiling. There’s no guilt in his words, no shame on his tongue, no venom at Callahan for the bad habits that have become second nature, that he’d kill where they stood if only he knew  _how._  Soon as Toren says it, he changes the subject, refuses to linger. It’s so simple, and Callahan realizes he’s thought about it nearly every day since then.

_“You’re lying, silly! Anyways…”_

Not  _“You’re such a fraud.”_

Not  _“Everyone can see right through you.”_

Not  _“You only live in these worlds because you know you’ll never amount to anything.”_

Just a smile to put the darkness around them to bed, and an endeared sort of laugh on Toren’s lips—

 _“That can’t be the truth._ ”

It’s in that single moment in time that Callahan realizes it—Toren doesn’t care what it is he says, how much capacity for the truth he has inside him, if change is something he can even do. He’s charmed entirely, but only by the  _way_  he says it.

Lying to Toren is guiltless, easy, oh so tempting.

Somehow, this only makes Callahan want to tell the truth.

* * *

_My **scar** is from a polar bear, my **curse** is from a witch, _  
_I've caught a giant squid in **all** the seven seas. _  
_I've picked up rocks from distant moons astronomers will discover **soon**_  
_But I would give them all back **just for you**. _

 

 

“So there I was—facing down the angry beartic—completely run ragged from the frigid hike up the mountain—”

“No, you weren’t.”

“—I really thought it had me! But then, in what I thought was my final moment, I managed to parry its vicious attack and scare it away with nothing but my own brute strength!”

Toren’s laughing. “You didn’t!”

“I only barely escaped, unscathed except for a single wound. And that’s how I got this scar, Professor.”

Lost in Callahan’s words, he wipes a single tear from his eye, almost sheepishly holding himself together, in the way he so often does.

“How do you do that?” Toren says suddenly, lilacs blooming in his earthy gaze.

“...mm? Do what, exactly?”

The two of them are in the courtyard outside the lab, buttercups and clover tangled beneath their fingertips, pokémon napping on the other end of the shady tree at its center. Summer’s on its last legs, but the wind whistles all the same, a gentle song through Fula’s cobblestone streets. Callahan’s lingered, even though his home’s a few cities over. Toren wants to ask him why, but his anxious heart beats too loud— _what if all he hears is ‘go away, I don’t want you here’?_

Pidgey land a few feet from them, hopping hellos to the soft earth below. Toren’s voice dissolves a little, back into the shaky half-whisper where it usually rests.

“I mean, I-I can’t even… speak well when I’m telling the truth,” he runs a hand over the back of his neck. “My throat feels like it’s closing up, I-I just—it suddenly feels like I can hear everyone’s thoughts, and all anyone’s thinking is how stupid I look—”

Toren turns to the side. Pink flowers on the paleness of his cheeks.

“But you always… Callahan, you _always_  talk like you don’t care what anyone thinks,” he smiles, not meeting the other man’s eyes. “It doesn’t matter if you’re lying or not, you could probably convince… anyone of anything!”

Summer’s fading, but the sun’s warm still. Toren raises his head from where it’s buried in his knees, looks straight ahead while he stammers out half-statements of adoration.

“I wish you could somehow teach me, is all,” he says. “How to have that kind of faith in myself.”

Callahan exhales through his nose, leaning back on a single palm. The quiet unsettles Toren, makes his heart fill in gaps, where every minuscule second feels like ten. More than he ever has before, Callahan feels like a complete fraud. He’s standing in the wake of Fula’s most brilliant, poised before a man so far out of his league, he wonders how their paths were even allowed to cross. Toren’s  _right._  Somehow, he’s convinced this poor fool that his knack for deception is something to admire.

“I don’t know if it’s something that can be taught,” he says, honestly. “Y’see, it was kind of up to chance that I wound up the way I did.”

Toren finally looks back to him, curious. “It… was?”

Callahan looks around, as if to discern whether prying ears are listening. There’s a sudden seriousness to him as he’s peering hard into Toren, and the scientist has to fight with all he is not to get lost in the utter  _beauty_  of the other man’s features—the softness in the lashes framing his eyes, the contrast of it against the ruggedness of his expression. Toren swallows.

“My parents only ever told me the story once,” Callahan says sternly, placing a firm hand on Toren’s shoulder. The taller man pales, anticipating what he’s about to hear, even his racing thoughts unable to predict it—

“On the day I was born... the skies cracked open and released a downpour onto the humble cabin where my mother lay,” he began. “Thunder boomed relentlessly, and on the twelfth roar of the crying heavens above, that’s when they saw it—”

Lost in the narrative, Toren leans in. Callahan’s voice is dire, his eyes quivering.

“A wild mismagius, far larger and far more terrifying than any ghost they’d ever seen before, its visage twisted and aflame as they stood like durant before it!” he cried. “It spoke to them in their own tongue, a whispered threat…”

It’s only then that Toren wakes up. He deflates, expression twisting.

“ _Callahan!_ ”

“Your son will suffer a terrible curse!” Callahan continued, ignoring the other man completely. “Silver-tongued though he may be, not a word of truth will pass his lips—”

He’s cut off by the scientist’s laughter, again, far more hysterical this time than before. Toren laughs, and laughs, and  _laughs_ , and it’s a sound that makes Callahan’s face flush in such a way, he’s  _sure_  he must be coming down with something nasty. There’s a half-hearted attempt at finishing the story, but Toren clumsily tumbles backward with a startled yelp as he’s lost in the man’s words, prompting Callahan to messily swivel to the side to catch him.

The gesture snaps him out of his reverie almost instantly, being held in the arms of this wonderful, vibrant man. Toren’s been here before, so taken by the adrenaline of saving the world he loves, courage hardly needed to factor in. This time, though, there is no cloud of poison blanketing the city, no flames crawling up the mountain, no ancient beast to learn the heart of. Only the two of them and the wind, jostling petals from the grassy floor, cooling the searing sun above.

Toren’s white, then he’s pink, then he’s beet red—open-mouthed and flustered as he’s trying with all he is to formulate some semblance of words. An apology? An explanation? He feels like he’s done something  _wrong_ , certainly, but paradoxically there’s a part of him that wants to stay in Callahan’s arms forever.

“C-Callahan, I-I—”

With all he is, Callahan knows he was put on this earth to do one thing and one thing only—with what little he’s been given, to protect that which the earth has graced him with. Since the day he’s met each of them, he’s felt completely spoiled that a man like him is allowed to share space with people like Kellie and Mia. One to love is special. Two is greedy. Three is impossible. And yet…

Toren’s looking at him with a half-astounded, half-tortured expression. Like maybe he can’t believe it, either, but the last thing he wants to do is leave this moment they’re sharing.

“Professor,” he says, suddenly, and Toren can only muster half-coherent squeaks at this point.

“W-w-what?”

“Y’know,” Callahan brushes a lock of messy hair out of Toren’s eyes, and the scientist shudders at the touch, too flustered to breathe. “Maybe there is a way.”

“W-what do you m-mean?”

“It goes like this, see, I once… knew this guy…” Callahan says through a half-nervous grin. “And he was real smart. The smartest guy in the whole city, in fact. But for some reason, he couldn’t talk well either. It’s like all those smarts ended at his research, any eyes on him just made the poor guy freeze up.”

Toren’s formless in Callahan’s arms, peering up into him. His heart’s rattling around his ribcage in a way he’s never felt it before, far different from the fearful panic he’s used to. Like mothim in his lungs, perfumey sweet scent around his head.

“I dunno how I got so lucky,” he continues. “But somehow, he really took a liking to me. Let me stick around, even when our little B-plot with each other shoulda ended.”

Callahan laughs, and it’s the first time he sounds like even he can’t believe the tale he’s spinning.

“Sometimes the guy looked at me like I hung the stars for him!” he spits out, incredulous. “And maybe it was my imagination, but something otherwordly made me feel like… maybe there was more there than just two wandering souls.”

He’s telling this story in a way that’s so much less grandiose than every other one Toren’s heard, and the scientist makes another small noise, unsure where it’s meant to go.

“Y’know, like, uh… like maybe the two of us met cause we both needed something the other was offering,” Callahan says, oddly shy, a finger poised at his cheek. “Like two halves of some much greater whole.”

Eyes sparkling and stomach flipping, Toren swallows. With how much love is radiating from the other man’s voice, he’s never met this wonderful figure Callahan’s speaking of. The anxiety comes back for a moment, filling in bleak endings, cursed what-ifs.

“What…” Toren whispers, small-voiced. “...h-happened to him?”

Callahan freezes, then brightens. At the fear in Toren’s voice, his protective instinct returns, his composure lights a fire to burn away worries, doubts, fears. His faint smile turns to a grin, turns to a hearty laugh.

“Well, I swept him off his feet, of course!” Callahan boasts, his free arm thrown out for dramatic effect. “Spent a few days mucking around his lab before I worked up the courage to ask him out! I tell ya, the good Professor was so dense I practically had to spell it out for him, and he turned about as red as a sunburnt voltorb, but once we finally started going steady, we found out we worked way better together than we ever did apart!”

Toren swallows.  _So then… why…_

“He made me a little more honest, and I like to think I made him a little more bold,” he looks to the sun, to the bird pokémon tearing through the clouds. “In my wildest dreams, I like to think we were quite the power couple. It stands to reason, of course, that we lived happily ever after.”

He punctuates the story’s end with a look back in Toren’s direction, and his eyes seem to be pawing for some sort of validation, like he’s waiting for a reason to take the leap of faith lingering in the back of his heart. Toren raises a shaking hand to his own cheek, desperately trying to assuage his absolute lack of composure in Callahan’s wake, suddenly. The brunet casts a glance to the side before electing to rest his own palm atop it, gingerly, its softness contradictory as ever. Overwhelmed entirely by the contact, Toren’s long since closed his eyes in unsure anticipation before he realizes the distance between the two of them is no more.

The scientist jolts only for a moment, a half-muffled squeak that quickly dissolves into a contented sigh at the feeling of their lips together. The world outside seems to turn to watercolour in his peripheral before he shuts his eyes again and wills it away. Callahan feels Toren turn into jelly in the embrace, and Toren can’t help but run over all the times he’s played out this exact scenario in his head, how different living it is. In those daydreams, the other man is sly-eyed and confident, nails on his scalp and big arms enveloping him as though nothing else in the world is allowed to breathe their air. Right now, Callahan’s holding him with the tact of a cutiefly tiptoeing over a rosebush.

Reluctantly, Callahan pulls away, hopelessly endeared to Toren’s ajar monocle and wavering eyes and quaking frame, the crimson on his face up against an emerald sea of hair. The Professor is held together with string and glue, some wonderful kind of mess. Like a deerling in the headlights, Toren comes back, stammers out the only thing his self-defeating thoughts have allowed him to internalize.

“Th-This can’t be real,” Toren sputters. “It’s another tall tale, right?!”

Callahan furrows his brow, then softens. A single hand still resting atop Toren’s, he messily strings their fingers together before shooting the scientist another award-winning smile.

“Nah,” he says, from the bottom of his fickle heart.

  
  
  


“That one’s true.”

 

* * *

All I've ever wanted, see, was to tell you, **honestly**  
I'd do anything for you.   
I'd do absolutely **anything** for you.

**Author's Note:**

> christmas in retail killed me and ven we're trying to write dte but its so fucking hard lmao. soon
> 
> IN THE MEANTIME. i will definitely take prompts with these two until i die.


End file.
